Monday, May 28, 2007

Wolfowitz: I'm The Victim Here.

Today Paul Wolfowitzblamed his firing from his position as director of the World Bank on the media, declaring it had nothing to do with the enhanced pay package he gave his girlfriend.

"I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I'll leave it at that," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. "People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend."

Wolfowitz is the primary author of the Bush Doctrine and chief neoconservative architect of the fight against Saddam Hussein. The obviously ethically challenged Wolfowitz certainly didn't come to the World Bank without controversy and over the objections of the western European powers. Historically the U.S. chooses the director the the World Bank.

The New York Times reported on the subplot surrounding Wolfowitz at the World Bank.

When President Bush appointed Paul D. Wolfowitz as the president of the World Bank two years ago, the White House had to put down an insurrection among European nations that viewed the administration’s best-known neoconservative as a symbol of American unilateralism and arrogance.

He came with the goal of fighting corruption in the third world nations that depend on the World Bank for development funds.

In foreign capitals, and among the bank’s staff members, it has been noted that Mr. Wolfowitz’s passion for fighting corruption, which he has said saps economic life from the world’s poorest nations, seemed to evaporate when it came to reviewing lending to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, three countries that the United States considers strategically vital. Some longtime bank staff members complained that Mr. Wolfowitz relied too little on experts in international development and too much on a pair of aides who served with him in the administration.

It would seem that Mr. Wolfowitz left the Defense Department with some of his aides and just moved to the World Bank to further the Bush policy of unilateralism. The arrogance of these people is beyond belief.

Over time, Mr. Wolfowitz created an impression that at critical moments he was putting American foreign policy interests first, most notably when he suspended a program in Uzbekistan after the country denied landing rights to American military aircraft, and directed huge amounts of aid to the countries he once recruited to sign on to Washington’s counterterrorism agenda.

Of course payback is certainly hell and Mr. Wolfowitz had some coming.

In the backlash against Mr. Wolfowitz, though, there is also an undercurrent of settling scores — including those that go beyond the World Bank. Europeans still fume over Mr. Bush’s decision to send John R. Bolton, one of the biggest critics of the United Nations, to New York to serve as ambassador there — an experiment that ended when it became clear that the newly Democratic Senate would not confirm him to finish Mr. Bush’s term.

Not everything in this world is black an white as Mr. Bush would want you to believe. Mr. Wolfowitz was certainly a victim of payback, but as we all know you should not give your enemies ammunition to use against you. Mr. Wolfowitz let his ego and his libido bring him down.

He should have stood tall and accepted that he made a mistake, just another in a long string. Instead he blamed the media. How pathetic.